The embodied art of softening: tips for the modern day woman
Do you know what one of the most underrated, yet highest yielding practice for busy, modern day women is?
The art of softening.
As modern day women holding all that we do there is an energetic, physiological and emotional tendency to harden.
You can feel it in the line of tension down your jaw, the shallowness of your breath, the brain that flits incessantly back ‘n’ forth while all you wanna do is sleep… because you just keep pushing all the stress down instead of learning to release it.
You notice it when you withdraw & put a tiny wall up against your partner, when, really, what you desperately, desperately want is to dissolve all those protection mechanisms and melt into those strong outstretched arms and be held so tight that you can let it all go …
You notice it when you take your lunch break but you’re still as irritable, exhausted and dissatisfied as before because your body doesn’t know how to get out of “go-mode” and actually receive the nourishment, pleasures and life brimming around you.
Just like how it took you 10 whole days of your two week holiday to actually unwind because you’ve trained the muscle of your body & heart to grip instead of soften, open and BE.
And sure enough, these aren’t once every now and again things, it becomes the way you actually do life.
The stress and tension keeps piling up, and piling up, and piling up to the point that you can feel how it’s beginning to overwhelm your nervous system,
and it feels suffocating, and if you’re being honest, a little bit scary
so you grip even tighter,
and try even harder to keep it all together,
and being soft enough to let life in becomes not only counterproductive to all the sh*t that you’ve got to get done and all the people you need to feed and schedules you need to maintain
but it also becomes something you don’t know how to do anymore.
Because hard is the default holding pattern in your body.
Even in you knew where that switch was to turn soft back on again, you don’t actually feel safe to reach for it.
And…
SCREW THAT.
Screw us being so completely at the mercy of the pressures of modern day that it takes us away from ourselves.
It’s time to rewrite the story of softness in your body
Why?
…so you can sink back into that bath with a relaxed, joyful sigh and have an hour pass by without a single care in the world
…so you can lean into him on the couch and let the tears fall, and you can see as your partner tucks the hair behind your ear that they understand, and they’re there to support you, and no, you don’t have to hold it all alone
…so you feel your flame of soft, sensual aliveness kindle awake from deep within, laughter brewing as you feel that evocative, erotic power tickle and tease you back into fully savouring life and it’s pleasures again.
…so you can feel the utter relief of feeling like you again.
I want that for me, and I want that for all of us.
HOW TO CULTIVATE SOFTNESS
Softening is an art, because it’s not a one & done linear process, it takes devotion, skill, and the desire to truly revel in it.
1. BODY AWARENESS & RESPONSE
You can’t begin the art of softening without first cultivating sensitivity to your body. You must first practice scanning your body for tension, noticing when you are locked up, where you hold your tension (for me, between my eyes, my right arm, trapeze muscles, jaw, bum-hole!) and noticing when they feel super tight.
Once you are aware of how tight you are in your body, pay attention to what your body needs to stop gripping so tight. Sometimes that’s as simple as getting up from your desk and doing some wiggling, maybe its widening your gaze out towards the horizon to settle that hyper-focus orientation, maybe it’s a long slow, deep breath.
Practice bringing awareness and response to your body regularly throughout the day - set a timer on the hour if you have to, to train yourself to stop overriding and pushing through, but to create a gentle, responsive relationship with your body.
2. DAILY AUDIT
For me the art of softening has to begin with noticing first and foremost where I am not soft, and doing an audit of what contributes to my hardening, and what contributes to my softening.
What in your day hardens you?
double espressos to wake up
unloading the dishwasher first thing
kids fighting and whingeing
racing the clock in traffic to get to school or meetings on time
phone notifications
believing I need to respond to an email or message immediately
looking at my phone in the morning and at night
bottling up emotions and pushing through
moving at a pace faster than love
What could you do that softens you instead?
spending a moment with my feet on the grass, face turned to the rising sun before doing anything
low, ambient lights at night or better yet, candlelight
my embodied movement practice at the end of the day to release stress and worries
rolling (foam or with a firm ball) over muscles and fascia to release tension
journalling at night
planning my day out the night before
no caffeine coffees, or homemade brewed chais
notifications off, and boundaries around phone use
3. FREELY EXPRESS YOUR EMOTIONS
Suppressed emotions are the number one cause of chronic stress (and hardness). We tend to intellectualise or ignore our emotions and feelings, we tend to push them down in attempt to “keep it all together”. Instead we need to be able to express and process them in such a way that the residual energy is moved freely through us, instead of getting stuck and stagnating, contributing to a tense, hard way of living.
4. MOVE STRESS & TENSION OUT OF YOUR BODY
At the end of the day stress, tension, hardness manifest in our physical bodies, the emotions we suppress, the overwhelm in our nervous systems, the walls we hold against another and all of this is represented in the muscles, fascia, nerves and posture of your body.
One of my favourite activities is to grab a foam roller or a sock with two tennis balls in it, and to roll around on any knots or tight spots until I feel a release. Doing this in addition to emotional release practices support us to “empty us out” and soften us.
5. SENSUALITY & PLEASURE
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, sensuality and pleasure are a woman’s secret sauce. Pleasure directly counteracts stress in your body, it is physiologically impossible to feel pleasure and stress at the same time, so prioritise pleasure like your wellbeing and happiness depends on it.
The best avenue to pleasure? Through your senses.
Weave in the below sensual experiences into your home/workplace:
Sight: beauty, art, flowers and deeply satisfying design elements in your home.
Touch: beautiful textures, and playing with tactile practices like self-massage with oils.
Sound: music that speaks to you and transports you and makes you feel
Taste: pause long enough to taste the morsels of food against your tongue, tease yourself until you’re salivating to eat.
Smell: diffuse oils, burn scented candles, wear oils or scents that bring a smile to your face.
6. RECLAIMING REST
Without adequate sleep and rest our nervous system cannot unwind. The stressors that build up throughout the day don’t have a chance to empty. We need to rest if we have any hope at all of softening.
But most women I work with have a skewed relationship with rest. For many, rest is something that only comes after we earn it, rest comes after productivity, but in a truly regenerative society rest precedes productivity. Rest is what fuels us, not our reward for spending ourselves.
Consider where you are overriding your body, denying yourself rejuvenating opportunities to rest (aka without a phone or screen in sight) and proper sleep hygiene.
7. BODY-BASED ENQUIRY & SUPORT TO FIND BELONGING & WHOLENESS
Oftentimes tension and hardness - be it the protective walls, or the coiled muscles, or the tight grip of control towards life are signs of deep-seated patterns and coping mechanisms that arrived in response to certain traumatic experiences or wounds.
Somatic therapy and embodied coaching can support you to connect with the root cause of what is going on, create more safety and opening in your body, and bring more softness to your being.
Oftentimes the push, perfectionism, and people pleasing that contributes to our hardness is a result of an overwhelming loss of worth and belonging, of a feeling that what we do and how we are right now is not enough. This is a core wound that many of us, particularly women, carry, and no matter how much work we do, or success we reach, or people we support we still feel as though we fall short. So we keep on pushing, perfecting and pleasing…
to the cost of our own well-being, and absolutely at a cost to our ability to stop, soften, and receive.
Belonging is an inside job, it’s a matter of
I’ve found working with women from the frame of “there’s nothing to fix and everything to embrace” to be an incredibly powerful stance that supports our nervous systems to soften at a very deep level, and allows us to sink back into ourselves to find the inherent power, pleasure, and possibility that exists within us all, irrespective of where we are at - with joyful relief,
and the paradoxical realisation that softening is often our greatest source of strength.
I hope you enjoyed and take on board these tips.
Here’s to an era of soft, embodied and deliciously alive women!
x
Jess